Rain
by oddania
Summary: He isn't sure how to feel about the looming clouds overhead or the way the rain rapped at his windshield as Baatar's fingers gripped the steering wheel harder. He's nervous, anxious, and terrified at the same time, heart thumping erratically in his chest. It was Lena's twenty-fourth birthday and he hasn't seen his daughter in three years. Warnings: illness, violence, and language.
1. Chapter 1

**I suppose this is my first shot at writing something very sad. I found inspiration after class and thought it would make a good (yet depressing) story. **

**Warning: Depictions of illness, mentions of violence, and language. **

* * *

He isn't sure how to feel about the looming clouds overhead or the way the rain rapped at his windshield as Baatar's fingers gripped the steering wheel harder. He's nervous, anxious, and terrified at the same time, heart thumping erratically in his chest.

It was Lena's twenty-fourth birthday and he hasn't seen her in three years.

The drive is relatively silent, almost too silent for his own good because there aren't any cars going this way on the road. It's barren and lively, all-too promising for the day he's been dreading since his daughter turned twenty-years-old.

And Baatar has absolutely no clue what to expect.

The staff aren't surprised when he walks through the doors. Their faces remain deadpan as ever, void of any expression other than mild annoyance when one family asks when they'd be able to see their son. Their nurse tells them they need to wait because he isn't ready yet, but Baatar knows exactly what her tone means.

Kuvira always wondered what these sort of places looked like. The vestibule was a false representation of what the government tried to conceal from the public. Baatar wonders exactly how much they really care for these patients since half of them, if they're ever discharged, wind up homeless in the lower ring of Ba Sing Se.

The nurse approaches him next, clipboard in hand. "You on the other hand are cleared to go on through. The doctor will escort you at those doors."

His palms are clammy despite his calm demeanor, fingers weaving through his graying hair as the doctor points down towards the end of the hall.

There's one desk and two chairs in the room he's taken. It's cold and damp and unbearably eerie, every sound he makes echoing off of the brick walls.

There's a knock on the door and they push her in, one man slipping through before the metal door slams shut behind them.

"What the fuck, Zan!?" She shouts, her hair whipping back around her shoulders as she slams her fist against the door. "This is bullshit!"

Baatar instinctively stands up from his seat, approaching his daughter for the first time in what felt like more than a few years. It bewilders him how much he wants to reach out to Lena despite how afraid he is of her. Baatar wonders if it's just fatherly-instinct, or that he's simply telling himself it might help him, and possibly her, feel better like it used to.

She turns her head before Baatar has the chance to reach out to her.

Lena's dark, sunken eyes widen when they meet Baatar's. She stops gritting her teeth and a single strand of faded hair falls in front of her pale face.

She reminds him of how Kuvira looked after a year in prison following the attack on Republic City.

"Dad…what are you doing here?" Lena asks, reaching tentative fingers out to touch his cotton shirt.

As soon as he tries to grasp her hand in his own, she reels back. "Wait, where's mom?"

Baatar sighs quietly. "She's…not coming, Lena."

"What do you mean she's not coming? She's with you, I know she is, she told me she was coming!"

He's completely baffled by her response, exchanging glances with the other man in the room before stepping back to take his seat again.

The silence he's met with again makes him more uncomfortable than before. Baatar waits for Lena to approach him, her eyes dazed and off in another world much like they were the last time he saw her. They're more intimidating now.

"She calls me on the phone sometimes. I missed her voice." Lena says, her gaze passing directly through him. "Sometimes the doctors won't let me talk to her. They say she's not there, but I know she is, Dad. I know she is."

There's another pause before Lena throws herself onto him and wraps her arms around Baatar's neck, frightening him enough that he can feel his heart freeze.

"I told her why I had to do it, but she won't listen!" Lena growls. "She keeps telling me it's my fault and that I could've stopped it. And then there's red_, red, red, you knew what you were doing_. But she doesn't understand, Dad. No one does."

His right hand gently touches her back, hoping that the gesture might do _something_. Lena lifts her head, reaching up to feel the graying stubble that's grown along his jaw. "Like metal. Old metal. Rusting metal."

Baatar feels a wash of guilt course through his veins as he wonders what she could've been like had he visited her more often. _Would that have actually done any good? _He asks himself, watching his daughter's eyes scan his features.

He can't understand what's going on in her head. He can't understand what she's trying to tell him, _if_ there's anything to tell.

"What happened to you?" She says next, digging her fingers into his shoulders. "You used to be so bright and vibrant."

"I was home with our family." He says quietly.

"Do they miss me? Do they want to see me?"

He isn't sure how to answer her question.

She frowns, standing up and crossing her arms over her chest. Before Lena has the chance to speak again, there's a loud shout from outside the room. It turns in frantic screaming and cries for help before the atmosphere grows very, very still.

"That's Ryu." Lena uncrosses her arms. "His mother tried to kill him, too."

Baatar's expression falters instantly and he furrows his brows. "Your mother never tried to kill you."

"Yes she did!" She balls her hands into fists. "Every night she tells me she will and then later she tells me it will be okay and that nothing will happen. Sometimes," she turns around, reaching out to touch the brick, "I'll paint her stories on my wall."

Baatar knows that the hospital doesn't provide it's patients with art supplies.

"Mom tells me to paint my walls with red." Lena traces her fingers along the white borders of the bricks. He sees the cuts on her hand. "And so I do."

—

Suyin is growing increasingly anxious as she waits for her son's train to roll in.

"How did it go, sweetie?" She asks, taking Baatar's hand when he reaches her.

"It was fine, mom."

His eyes are brimmed a melancholy red.

—

One year passes before Baatar hears of his daughter again.

He's in the lab at work when his assistant opens the door and peaks inside, claiming that there's a phone call for him in his office.

And when he goes to answer, the voice from the other end of the line is unrecognizable.

"Baatar Junior Beifong?"

He raises a brow. "Speaking. Who is calling?"

"Doctor Zōu, from the Yīzhì Psychiatric Hospital."

Baatar feels a chill rush down his spine and blood run cold. "What happened?"

"Nothing of concern, sir. I'm calling with regard to your daughter, Lena Beifong. She's scheduled for release in one week."

"When was this decided?" He asks, jaw agape and confusion etched in his features upon hearing the news. He was never informed that the hospital had planned to release her, especially not this soon.

"Recent pharmaceutical studies proposed a treatment that effectively treats schizophrenia for patients admitted in this hospital. Your daughter has been medicated for the past nine months and has shown ideal improvement. We'll brief you with the details when you arrive—uh, I apologize that you were unaware—so that she can continue treatment without our care."

"How are you so sure it works?" He asks anxiously.

"Trust me, Mr. Beifong, we've been monitoring her for nearly one year. Although, there is a side effect."

Baatar leans into the table. "Go on."

"Depression is a common effect of the medication. Lena may be unresponsive and reserved, so we encourage that your daughter be exposed to an enlightening environment and other positive factors."

He runs a hand through his hair, sighing. Baatar wasn't entirely convinced, and the prospect of bringing his daughter home worried him slightly, but he had to trust the experts. He had to trust that maybe, just maybe, everything might be okay. "Thank you, Doctor."

Suyin is excited to hear that her granddaughter was returning home, although she notices her son's reserved expression as soon as she smiles.

"You're not happy?"

"It isn't that I'm not happy," he starts, voice shaking and shoulders slumping. "I'm worried things might never be okay again, Mom. I don't know if Lena's even aware that she—"

Suyin stops him before he can continue, squeezing Baatar's arm reassuringly. She knows how painful it is for him to talk about Kuvira. "I think she does know, son. The doctor said she's stable. I'm sure they told her what happened."

—

It's raining again when he pulls up to a parking spot in front of the hospital. The last time it rained, the day brought an onslaught of dreadful memories and emotions. He wonders if the same will happen again today.

She's sitting in one of the lounge's chairs next to a nurse when Baatar walks inside. Lena lifts her head immediately, tears spilling down her cheeks as she meets his eyes.

This time, when she reaches out for him, Lena doesn't reel back.

The doctor tells him everything that's happened for the past year of her treatment. Baatar is spared of the medical terminology, although he listens to ever small detail as carefully as possible. He's always been an analyst, putting pieces of the puzzle together before forming a conclusion relative to the focus. He wants to remember what the doctors did so that he can reinforce those tactics at home.

The entire time he listens, Baatar holds his daughter's hand. Something about the gesture tells him she's going to be okay.

They didn't have the same reunion as some of the other families and their loved ones. It wasn't very emotional despite the fact that Lena cried, but she seemed to sense Baatar's uneasiness and did her best to make him feel more at ease. She doesn't talk to anyone, nor does she do more than accept his hug and hold his hand.

Lena is mute for a majority of the drive to the station, gathering her strength and comfort from Baatar's touch.

—

"We haven't touched your room." Baatar says, opening the door to Lena's bedroom. "I thought you might appreciate that when you see it again."

The first thing she says shocks him beyond words.

"You should have burned it all."

"Why?" Baatar asks incredulously. "These are your possessions—your memories, Lena. You should cherish them."

"They told me what happened to Mom. What I did to her…"

Baatar stiffens. _Oh__… _"Lena, it's not your fault."

She glances up at him, eyes brimmed with tears again. "How is it not my fault?"

Baatar grasps her shoulders, his tone determined. "That wasn't you—"

"How was it not me!?" She shouts, screwing her eyes shut tightly. Lena balls her hands into fists, roughly wiping away the waterworks that were spilling down her cheeks. "Dad, I _killed_ her! I killed my own mother—"

"Stop." He says, pulling his daughter into a tight embrace. He lets her sob into his shirt because he knew that she would never recover easily, if that was even a possibility. "That wasn't you, it was never you."

"It was always me, what are you talking about?"

He weaves his fingers gently through Lena's hair, doing his best to soothe her despite his own rampaging emotions. Baatar masks his own feelings for the sake of his daughter, rocking them in place to a slow, steady rhythm. He doesn't want to lose her again, not after living the past five years without seeing her smile or feeling her warm presence.

"It was never you."

* * *

**Lena doesn't actually have schizophrenia. But we learned about it in class and I was hit with the muse. This is an AU idea.**


	2. Epilogue

.:Epilogue:.

_Five years later._

She rolls down the window because it's too hot inside the car and she doesn't know how much longer she can go without feeling the wind whipping through her hair. Lena sticks her hand outside to feel the cold droplets splatter against her skin, and she takes a deep breath, reveling in the fresh air.

"What are you doing?" Baatar's eyes grow wide as he reaches for the window crank beside his leg. She's faster than him, though, catching the handle with her bending before he has the chance to use it.

"Don't worry, Dad," Lena smiles, "nothing's going to happen."

"The rain is going to ruin the controls—"

She grabs the jacket she's had laying on her lap and uses it to cover her side of the door. Baatar sighs reluctantly, mumbling something about how stubborn she is before refocusing his eyes on the road.

"If anything happens, Suyin can still buy you another door." She jokes, winking when he turns to send her a senseless glare.

"I'm going to have to tell Keisai to stop visiting us." Baatar chuckles. "He's rubbing off on you too much."

Lena puckers out her lower lip. "It's not a bad thing." She says, leaning against the palm of her hand as more rain starts to drip down her arm and soak her sleeve. "You say that so often, too."

"What, that he's rubbing off on you too much?"

"No," she laughs, "that he should stop visiting. Admit it, Dad, Keisai's fun to have over."

At that moment, Baatar realizes how much her words rang true. Keisai had saved his life for the second time that year.

His smile vanishes.

Baatar remembers all too vividly how horrible the world seemed to be when he lost Kuvira — the way it stopped and came to such a gruesome halt before his eyes. He didn't have time to realize what happened until it was already too late, his heart so heavy it sank deep down into the ground, if not farther, and nothing had ever been more blurry.

_Save her_, Kuvira had said as he cradled her in his shaking arms. _Don__'__t let this all be for nothing_.

_I won__'__t_, his voice was falling apart, tearing streaming down his cheeks. _She loves you, Kuvira. She loves you, I promise._

She smiles…and everything suddenly becomes empty.

Lena squeezes his arm, pulling Baatar out of his trance. He blinks several times before addressing his daughter's concern, refashioning another smile with hope that she might do so in return.

When she doesn't, he brings the back of her hand against his lips and Lena is thoroughly thrown off by the gesture. She decides that it is best not to ask because he was probably thinking about Kuvira again, and the last thing she wanted to do was confirm her suspicions. She felt so out of place each time this happened.

The jacket falls from the side of the door, unnoticed.

Baatar holds her hand close until he has to ease up on the gas and pull the car into neutral, stopping at the next sign. He briefly glances down at his wristwatch, noticing that it was half past eleven in the morning. "Did you take your medication?"

"Is it time to?"

He nods and she turns around to grab her bag from the back seat, sifting through its contents until she pulls out the little blue cartridge and opens the lid that says _Tuesday_. It never ceases to surprise him how many pills she takes each day: clozapine, chlorpromazine, haloperidol, imipramine, and promethazine. He remembered all of their names by now, written out their chemical formula a thousand times, and wondered exactly how these drugs worked.

Baatar remembers how much he hated telling his family that Lena had to take antipsychotics. The word seemed so harsh, so_ bitter_, and therefore he preferred used the term "neuroleptic" instead.

Whether or not that was because he still lived in a state of denial is debatable. Baatar doesn't have the strength to say his daughter is psychotic. Sick, very sick, yes, but never psychotic. Never crazy. Never insane. How could any doctor, any relative, any person convince a parent that their child is psychotic? Just hearing that something is so very wrong with his little girl was enough to force Baatar deeper into his own morbid state of mind.

He knew something was wrong back then, but neither he nor Kuvira saw the severity of it. Not until it was already too late.

_What happened?_ Suyin's voice was laced with panic as her eyes drifted from her son to his daughter. There's blood. Too much blood. Too much to be an accident. Suyin had her fingers curled tightly around Lena's wrist in an unbreakable grip. _What in spirit__'__s name happened, Junior?_

Lena laughed at her, at him, at everything, until her expression changes and her face is written with fear. _Don__'__t answer that! They__'__ll know who you are. They__'__ll know if you lie!_

_Junior__…_ he could see his mother's hands starting to shake.

_They know. _Lena whispers._ They know about you. _She turns so sharply to Suyin that it makes the her jump and her skin crawl with anticipation. _Stupid. Now look what you__'__ve done._

"So…how much longer?"

Baatar shakes his head, pulling back one hand to rub his eyes. _Shit_. "About two hours."

Lena's eyes fall down to her lap and her smile dissipates instantly. "You're…thinking about it again, aren't you?"

He doesn't answer. He doesn't know how. He doesn't have the heart to.

She's asleep not more than half-an-hour later because the medication kicked in, and Baatar spends the last two-hour duration of the drive thinking.

The past year with Lena had felt so tremendously long. He was happy, happier than he originally thought, to have his daughter home again despite everything that happened, but Baatar knew from the moment he stepped off the train that things would never be the same again.

The medication always made her groggy, at least for a few hours, but they worked. She needed something strong because otherwise the Lena he raised wouldn't be his little girl anymore, and that terrified them both. She didn't want to lose herself again, not after the hospital and all the experiments, the tests, the trials that she objected to but was forced into anyways. The doctors said it was for her own good as they stuck her arm with a needle and she felt her skin crawl.

Lena hates that she can remember segments of the past two years of her life. The memories from the treatments, when they were successful, haunt her because she knows that it had been so much worse without them. Each time the drugs were fifty-percent effective, she was fifty-percent insane and that meant learning how to cope with the voices, the thoughts, and the anger that stemmed from her mother's tone as she whispered into her ear.

Back then, Lena didn't understand why most of the voices she heard were Kuvira's.

Baatar remembers how the newfound treatment brought upon a side-effect that Lena had never experienced before.

The doctor warned them, and then came the one day where she hadn't left her room at all, not even to eat (she had the stomach of an ostrich-rhino and Baatar reminds her everyday, with a smile, that she takes that after him). He let himself inside to see her sprawled out along her messy bedsheets and distressed comforter, wiping her eyes and combing back her hair. Lena whispered something about how much she hated it all before he recognized the empty prescription bottle and realized that she took more than she should've.

_I__'__m so tired of feeling numb, _she said, _and I thought that if I took more, it would work better_.

_The only person that can help me right now will never be here anymore_.

The doctor prescribes her haloperidol and imipramine, two recently manufactured anti-depressants.

And they have worked ever since.

.:.

There aren't very many selections to choose from on the shelves. Lena likes the glass candle cases, though, because they were entirely hand-made with designs and details molded into the crystal. She liked the red ones more than the other colors because they look traditional and unique, and don't blend in with the ground and much as the others. She picks the red case with a floral cut and lattice-lined lid, and Baatar finds a tall, strong candle to leave inside. the storekeeper says that it'll last them nearly a month, and given how far away the cemetery was from their home, it seemed like the perfect option.

"We should get flowers, too." Baatar says, glancing over at the vases lined up along the sidewalk. "Your mother always loved tiger lilies."

_The noble flower. _"She did." _The strong flower._ _The proud flower._ _The inspiring flower_."They were her favorite."

Baatar smiles and kindly asks the man if they could purchase a set of tiger lilies, and Lena grabs the nearest group, cradling them in her arms as they step into the cemetery.

"How ironic," she says halfway through as a drop of water drips onto her nose, "In the movers, it always rains when something sad is about to happen."

The air around them seems heavier as they walk closer and closer to Kuvira's headstone, and throughout the duration of their stroll, Lena tries to tell herself that she is okay and that it won't be as difficult as living in Zaofu. But like countless times before, it's a wasted effort and Baatar knows how much it tears her up on the inside. He takes his daughter's hand in his, squeezing her fingers gently.

They stop in front of the decorated headstone that bears Kuvira's name and Lena admires how beautiful it looks despite the weeds growing around it's marble edges.

She doesn't talk first, her father does, because she can't stand the clutter of annoying greenery. Part of her wonders how long it's been since Baatar last visited the cemetery.

She pulls out the weeds and replaces the last bouquet of flowers with the new ones, and now the marble seems to glow.

Much like her mother's smile.

When Baatar steps back and places a reassuring hand over her shoulder, she knows it's time. Time to finally gather all the strength she's mustered and talk to Kuvira for the first time in several years.

"Hey, Mom." She begins, wrapping her arms around herself because that's how she deals with the loss. "It's been so long without you and…and I want to tell you how much better I am but I know that's impossible." She sighs, fumbling with her words. "Everyone tells me that eventually, things will go back to normal, but I keep counting the years." She slumps her shoulders. "Spirits, I'm trying so hard to not be an emotional wreck right now."

The rain is falling harder now, every cold drop seeping through her clothes and chilling her bones. That doesn't matter, though, because the tears that fall from her eyes are hot as the slip down her cheeks.

"I miss you." She chokes. "There isn't a day that goes by where I don't regret _everything_; where I don't hate myself for doing this to you."

Baatar steps out from under the tree because he can't bear to hear her talking this way. He wraps his arm around her because he's aware she still wants to talk to Kuvira, and squeezes her shoulder so that she knows he's there for her. They both soak in the pouring rain.

For months he watched Lena stare at herself in the mirror of their apartment's bathroom, gazing back at her reflection with furrowed brows, searching her own green eyes for something he didn't have the answer to, and sighing when she couldn't look at herself any longer. It makes Baatar sad that no matter how many times he tells her how much he loves her and they will be okay, she never really believes him.

"I hope you can forgive me."

"She already has, Lena. She loves you, I promise." Baatar says, reminded of the last time he said those words. They have a different purpose now, and it doesn't make him sad. He smiles for his daughter because she's his world — she always will be. "We'll see her again."

Lena takes a deep breath, wiping her eyes for what she knows won't be the last time. "Okay."

* * *

**That's a wrap, guys. I hope you all liked this story and how it's come along. It's been an interesting ride getting to flesh this idea out. Thank you again for sticking by and reading!**


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